Emma Paternotte studied medicine at the Free University of Amsterdam. In 2011 she graduated and started working as a resident in obstetrics & gynecology in the Saint Lucas Andras hospital, a district teaching hospital with an ethnically diverse patient population.

Emma’s research focused on the communication between doctors of the major ethnicity and patients of the minor ethnicity.

Emma will report on a realist review about intercultural communication. In this review she tried to find out mechanisms which could direct the communication outcome (i.e. barrier or facilitator). She therefore included 145 articles and found out that these mechanisms could be divided in behavior, attitude and knowledge. Many of these mechanisms could also be found in general communication. This can be helpful in the development of training for doctors.

Based on this review, she started a Delphi procedure to develop an observational scale which can be used as a framework to evaluate the intercultural communication between doctors and patients.